A Bootiful Podcast: Mark Kropf on AI orchestration

Hi Spring fans! I was delighted to get a chance to sit and talk to my pal and Pivotal alum Mark Kropf about his efforts around orchestrating AI. This doesn’t have to do with the JVM or Spring, per se, but it’s an interesting discussion nonetheless...

This Week in Spring - April 7th, 2026

Hi Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's April 7th, 2026, and I'm on the road! I started the journey for the amazing Voxxed Days Amsterdam show and am now winding my way through France. I visited Colmar, a beautiful city from which the animators on Disney's Beau...

Spring AI Agentic Patterns (Part 6): AutoMemoryTools — Persistent Agent Memory Across Sessions

File-Based Long-Term Memory for Spring AI Agents Agents are only as useful as what they remember. Spring AI's Chat Memory stores the full conversation and can persist it across restarts, but when the window fills, the oldest messages are evicted. The upcoming Session API will add recursive...

A Bootiful Podcast: Java developer advocate Ana-Maria Mihalceanu

I had a wonderful chat with Java Developer Advocate Ana-Maria Mihalceanu about Java Flight Recorder, Project Babylon, Project Panama, and so many other exciting things in the Java ecosystem...

This Week in Spring - March 31st, 2026

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another fun edition of This Week in Spring! I'm writing to you from beautiful Amsterdam ahead of the wonderful Voxxed Days Amsterdam event, and I'm really looking forward to it. If you're there, please come say hello! Also, be aware that I'll be speaking at the Paris J...

RediSearch Query via Unescaped TAG Filter Values in RedisVectorStore

In RedisFilterExpressionConverter of spring-ai-redis-store , when a user-controlled string is passed as a filter value for a TAG field, stringValue inserts the value directly into the @field:VALUE RediSearch TAG block without escaping characters...

A Bootiful Podcast: Daniel Garnier-Moiroux on MCP Security

Hi Spring, AI, Spring AI, security, and Spring Security fans! In this installment I talk to the legendary Daniel-Garnier Moiroux! ai mcp security java...

Server-Side Request Forgery in BedrockProxyChatModel via Unvalidated Media URL Fetching

spring-ai-bedrock-converse contains a Server-Side Request Forgery SSRF vulnerability in BedrockProxyChatModel when processing multimodal messages that include user-supplied media URLs. Insufficient validation of those URLs allows an attacker to induce the server to issue HTTP requests to unintend...

Server-Side Request Forgery via Filter Expression Keys in Neo4jVectorStore

spring-ai-neo4j-store contains a Cypher injection vulnerability in Neo4jVectorFilterExpressionConverter . When a user-controlled string is passed as a filter expression key in Neo4jVectorFilterExpressionConverter of spring-ai-neo4j-store , doKey embeds the key into a backtick-delimited Cypher...

This Week in Spring - March 24th, 2026

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to yet another rip-roarin' installment of This Week in Spring. As usual, we've got a ton to look into, so let's dive right in! Happy 22nd birthday to Spring Framework, released this day 22 years ago! and of course, next week, 1 April 2026, marks 12 years since Spring Boot...

Spring Cloud Config Profile Substitution Can Allow Unintended Access To Files And Enable SSRF Attacks

When substituting the profile parameter from a request made to the Spring Cloud Config Server configured to the native file system as a backend, it was possible to access files outside of the configured search directories. In addition, when using a source control backend, the profile parameter...

A Bootiful Podcast: Cay Horstmaan, legendary Java professor, author, lecturer

Hi, Spring fans! In this installment, we talk to the legendary Java author, professor, and Java Champion Cay Horstmann, whom you might know from classics such as "Core Java." his web site And of course even the most cursory search will land you at his books... javaone java...

Blending Chat with Rich UIs with Spring AI and MCP Apps

The way humans typically interact with AI is via a chat-style interface such as ChatGPT or Claude Desktop. In fact, the ability to converse with an AI in natural language is perhaps one of the most amazing things about this technology. It lets humans talk to computers in human terms, rather than...

This Week in Spring - March 17th, 2026

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another rip-roaring installment of This Week in Spring , which I'm posting ahead of my keynote at the amazing JavaOne 2026 event here in sunny San Francisco, California! I love Piotr's latest post on using local AI models with LM Studio and Spring AI Did you see the ne...

A Bootiful Podcast: Spring Messaging Legend Soby Chacko

Hi, Spring fans! In this installment, we talk with the legendary Soby Chacko about Apache Kafka, Spring AI, and much more! apachekafka kafka...

This Week in Spring - March 10th, 2026

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring. As I write this, I am preparing for a trip to Rust, Germany, for one of the best Java conferences in Europe: JavaLand, along with its new companion event, DevLand. It should be fun. Will you be around? If so, say hi. We have ...

This Week in Spring - March 9th, 2026

Hi Spring fans! Welcome to another rip-roaring installment of This Week in Spring! I'm writing this in an Uber en route to the airport to get to awsome Atlanta, GA, for Devnexus 2026! Who's goin'? You goin'? We - the Spring team - will be there in force! Come say hi at the boothes or come see our...

A Bootiful Podcast: Neo4j legend Jennifer Reif

Hi, Spring fans! In this installment, I talk to Jennifer Reif, developer advocate at Neo4J, about graph RAG, graph databases, GraphQL, Neo4J, Spring Data Neo4J, and more. neo4j graphRag AI artificialintelligence...

This Week in Spring - March 3rd, 2026

Hi Spring fans! Welcome to another rip-roaring installment of This Week in Spring! I'm writing this in an Uber en route to the airport to get to awsome Atlanta, GA, for Devnexus 2026! Who's goin'? You goin'? We - the Spring team - will be there in force! Come say hi at the boothes or come see our...

Moving beyond Strings in Spring Data

If you've worked with data access in Java and especially with Spring Data for a while, then you are familiar with various Query and Update programming models. You write data access code. You refactor a property name. You run your tests. They fail. Your query strings? Still pointing to the old...

A Bootiful Podcast - John Willis, author of 'Rebels of Reason'

Hi Spring fans! In this installment I sit down with DevOps legend and industry analyst extraordinaire John Willis and talk about his new book Rebels of Reason: The Long Road from Aristotle to ChatGPT and AI's Heroes Who Kept the Faith , and talk about the nature of the ecosystem, AI, the role of...

Optimizations in Spring MVC

Spring Fruits Benchmark Abstract Benchmarks are tricky to do well, and the results are often hard to interpret. This analysis attempts to go beyond a simple headline number to explore how performance varies with data set size. The results show that while results might be disappointing for a given...

This Week in Spring - February 24th, 2026

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another awesome and oh-so-agentic week in Spring! We've got a ton to look into, and I've got even more to prepare for next week's DevNexus event in Atlanta, GA, so let's dive right into it! Be sure to say "hi" if you're going to be there, though! You've heard of Agent...

A Bootiful Podcast: Glenn Renfro on Java and Spring community legend and my friend - on Devnexus and more

Hi, Spring fans! In this installment I talk to the amazing Glenn Renfro about Spring Batch, Spring Integration, Spring AI, and much more — plus why you should definitely register to attend the amazing Devnexus event in Atlanta, GA!...

This Week in Spring - February 17th, 2026

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another rip-roaring installment of This Week in Spring! It's Lunar New Year or Chinese New Year for billions of people around the world and to those who celebrate, Happy Chinese/Lunar New Year 新年快乐! Or Happy Spring Festival 春节快乐! My favorite kind of festival! In honor ...

A Bootiful Podcast: Java Champion and hilarious friend, Richard Fichtner

Hi, Spring fans! I've been waiting for this episode for so long! Today, we're finally joined by my friend Richard Fichtner, who so took pity on my plight waiting for music to be added to the GraalVM that his company, XDev Software, created the music-maven-plugin, the best Maven plugin, ever! This...

This Week in Spring - February 10th, 2026

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's February 10th, 2026, as I write this from lovely London, UK. I spoke at the local Java User Group here last night, had a wonderful time. Tomorrow, I'm going home. It's been fun, but it's time to conclude this roller...

A Bootiful Podcast: JetBrains and Spring community legend Marco Behler

hi, Spring fans! In this installment I have the privilege of talking to JetBrains legend Marco Behler...

This Week in Spring - February 3rd, 2026

Hi, Spring fans! This week I'm in northern Europe. I went on the Vaadin cruise from Finland to Sweden, gave a talk on a boat, then arrived in Stockholm in time for the amazing JFokus 2026 event where I had the privilege yesterday of doing a deep dive with my pal James Ward on Spring AI and agenti...

A Bootiful Podcast: Start Your Year with Java Right with Java Developer Advocate Billy Korando

Hi, Spring and Java fans! In this episode I am beyond delighted to talk Java developer advocate and longtime friend of the show Billy Korando about the latest-and-greatest in the Java ecosystem...

Spring AI Agentic Patterns (Part 5): Building Interoperable Agents with the Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol

The Agent2Agent A2A Protocol is an open standard for seamless AI agent communication. It enables agents to discover capabilities, exchange messages, and coordinate workflows across platforms—regardless of their implementation. Spring AI A2A integrates the A2A Java SDK with Spring AI through Sprin...

Anthropic Agent Skills Support in Spring AI

In this blog, we show how using Spring AI, we can integrate with Anthropic's Native Skills API for Cloud-Based Document Generation and Custom Skills. Spring AI adds support for Anthropic's Agent Skills — modular capabilities that let Claude generate actual files rather than text descriptions. Wit...

Spring AI Agentic Patterns (Part 4): Subagent Orchestration

Instead of one generalist agent doing everything, delegate to specialized agents. This keeps context windows focused—preventing the clutter that degrades performance. Task tool, part of the spring-ai-agent-utils toolkit, is a portable, model-agnostic Spring AI implementation inspired by Claude...

This Week in Spring - January 27th, 2026

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! As I write this, I cannot believe we're nearly at the end of the month! Time sure flies. Spring AI 2.0.0-M2 is available now Spring Modulith 2.1 M1, 2.0.2, and 1.4.7 released In last week's installment of A Bootiful Podcast ,...

This Week in Spring - January 26th, 2026

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! As I write this, I cannot believe we're nearly at the end of the month! Time sure flies. Spring AI 2.0.0-M2 is available now Spring Modulith 2.1 M1, 2.0.2, and 1.4.7 released In last week's installment of A Bootiful Podcast ,...

A Bootiful Podcast: Jetbrains legend Dmitry Jemerov

Hi, Spring and IntelliJ IDEA fans! This week we celebrate 25 years of Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEA, and who better to talk to us about its evolution than Dmitry Jemerov, whose been a contributor and developer for the project since 2003!...

Spring AI Agentic Patterns (Part 3): Why Your AI Agent Forgets Tasks (And How to Fix It)

Have you ever asked an AI agent to perform a complex multi-step task, only to find it skipped a critical step halfway through? You're not alone. Research shows that LLMs struggle with "lost in the middle" failures—forgetting tasks buried in long contexts. When your agent juggles file edits, test...

This Week in Spring - January 20th, 2026

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's already the 20th of January and we are off on yet another rip roarin' adventure as we look at the week that has been... this week in Spring! even more good stuff from Spring AI team legend Christian Tsolov, this one on...

Spring AI Agentic Patterns (Part 2): AskUserQuestionTool - Agents That Clarify Before Acting

Traditional AI interactions follow a common pattern: you provide a prompt, the AI makes assumptions, and produces a response. When those assumptions don't match your needs, you're left iterating through corrections. Each assumption creates rework—wasting time and context. What if your AI agent...

A Bootiful Podcast: Jonatan Ivanov on how to measure all the things with Micrometer

Hi, Spring fans! This week we catch up with the observably awesome Jonatan Ivanov on how to measure all the things with Micrometer...

Spring AI Agentic Patterns (Part 1): Agent Skills - Modular, Reusable Capabilities

Agent Skills are modular folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that AI agents can discover and load on demand. Instead of hardcoding knowledge into prompts or creating specialized tools for every task, skills provide a flexible way to extend agent capabilities. Spring AI's implementatio...

This Week in Spring - January 13th, 2026

Hi, Spring fans, and welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's the 13th of January, 2026, and it's been quite the week indeed! Let's dive right into it! Nobody, and I mean nobody , asked. So I put together a video on how to use Spring WS to build SOAP-based services in 2026. Hey...

A Bootiful Podcast: Spring Security lead Rob Winchon Spring Security 7

Hi, Spring fans! In this installment, I have the privilege of sitting down and talking to the legendary Rob Winch, lead of Spring Security, Spring Session, and the amazing Testjars project...

This Week in Spring - January 6th, 2026

Hi, Spring fans, to the first installment of This Week in Spring in the new year and , roughly, the fifteenth anniversary edition of this series! I've been writing these blogs since the first week of January of 2011, and I am proud to say that I haven't so far missed a single week! I've always...

A Bootiful Podcast: Apache Tomcat legend Mark Thomas (Happy new year!)

In this episode, I talk with Mark Thomas, the legendary and highly prolific committer to Apache Tomcat. Happy New Year!...

This Year in Spring – December 30th, 2025

Hi, Spring fans! Can you believe it? It's already the 30th of December! I celebrated Christmas with my family in Los Angeles, then we jumped on a flight headed for Southeast Asia to ring in the New Year with more friends and family. I'm sitting at a café in the sweltering city of Kuala Lumpur,...

Evolving Spring Vault: Introducing VaultClient

Back in September 2016, nearly a decade ago now, we introduced Spring Vault as a integration layer for HashiCorp Vault within Spring applications, complemented by Spring Cloud Vault for Spring Boot arrangements. The core idea has always been straightforward: Externalizing secrets to encrypted Vau...

A Bootiful Podcast: Nate Schutta the fundamentals of software engineering

Hi Spring fans, and happy holidays! I'm delighted to be joined again on this episode by my friend and fellow harbinger of doom in the best possible way, Nate Schutta — co-author of the wonderful book Foundations of Software Engineering!...

Explainable AI Agents: Capture LLM Tool Call Reasoning with Spring AI

When building AI agents with tool calling capabilities, developers often need insights into why an LLM chose a particular tool—not just which tool it selected. Understanding the model's reasoning process is important for debugging, observability, and building trustworthy AI systems. Spring AI now...

This Week in Spring – December 23rd, 2025

Happy holidays, everyone! The year may be winding down, but the Spring ecosystem continues unabated. We’re now a few weeks past the generational Spring Boot 4.0 release in November, and there have been tons of releases and patches since then. There’s also equal excitement reflected in posts from...